It’s not exactly a secret that there are deep political divisions in the United States, but on some issues a robust majority of Americans still agree. A recent national poll from Marquette Law School, for example, found 71% of Americans oppose changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Other recent surveys, including a poll from Fox News, pointed in a nearly identical direction.
Clearly, Donald Trump and his team are indifferent to public attitudes on the subject and have made the name change an odd priority. In fact, at a White House Cabinet meeting last week, “Gulf of America” caps were placed in front of every secretary for reasons that went unexplained.
But as it turns out, Cabinet secretaries aren’t the only ones who are expected to play along as if Trump’s idea had merit: Congressional Republicans are supposed to do the same thing. It’s against this backdrop that NBC News reported:
The Republican-led House on Thursday passed a bill that seeks to codify President Donald Trump’s executive order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. … Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia introduced the GOP bill after Trump signed an executive order in January that ordered Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to ‘take all appropriate actions to rename the Gulf’ and update a database of the ‘official names for geographic features in the 50 states.’
During the mind-numbing floor debate on the legislation, Greene, a notorious far-right conspiracy theorist, suggested that opponents of her proposal are secretly in league with Mexican drug cartels, which is why they support leaving the existing name in place.
She did not appear to be kidding.
Despite the absurdity of the legislative effort and the arguments presented by the bill’s chief sponsor, 211 House Republicans voted to pass the measure. Only one GOP member, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, joined with Democrats in opposition to the bill.
“We’re the United States of America. We’re not Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany or Napoleon’s France. I just — we’re better than this. It just sounds like a sophomore thing to do,” Bacon told CNN.
As for what the “Gulf of America Act” would actually do, the bill would codify Trump’s executive order, making it more difficult for future administrations to put things back, while directing the chairman of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to ensure that “any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the United States to the Gulf of Mexico” is deemed a reference to the “Gulf of America.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took some time on the chamber floor to condemn the legislation as “silly.” “When the American people woke up this morning, they could reasonably ask the question, ‘What are their elected representatives on the floor of the House of Representatives going to be debating?’” the New York Democrat said. “In an environment where the Trump tariffs are costing them thousands of dollars more per year, Republicans are crashing the economy in real time, costs are being raised on hardworking American taxpayers and Republicans are driving us toward a painful recession. What might members of Congress under this temporary Republican majority be debating on the floor today? Would it be legislation about the economy? Something about health care? Anything about Social Security? Perhaps something on public safety? Maybe national security matters? Anything to bring to life the American dream for hardworking American taxpayers? “No? What Republicans have decided to spend this entire legislative day doing is to debate a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico.” The legislation now heads to the Senate, where GOP leaders have not committed to bring the measure to the floor and where the bill would need 60 votes to clear Capitol Hill. If Trump is waiting to sign the legislation into law, he should probably lower his expectations.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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